Paul Graham:
Physicists and Professors of French Literature - Fortune

Paul Graham:
Physicists and Professors of French Literature

I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter
than professors of French Literature.

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and
sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are
told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French
literature, and the French literature professors are told they have
to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail,
they’ll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist
Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him
to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to
fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist
getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics
journal?